Category Archives: Work in Progress

Next on the agenda is a new website. The old one has sat there, mainly acting as a repository for odds and ends, for about five years now. This is partly because I designed it myself from scratch as an experiment to see what I could do with css, and as I have become busier and busier, I never did get to tidying it up and making it easy to update.

So when I had new things to add, it was easier just to stuff them in wherever I felt they fit than to rewrite the code and make it all plug and play. Whatever the excuses, if I want to market this book (and possibly the other one which has been 'under consideration' with a local publisher for a number of years now; I reckon I could do that myself now as well) I need a website which people will want to visit, and which offers some kind of experience other than "my word, that's busy". I also have this blog now for odds and ends, so the website needs to become more of a marketing tool.

So I took a deep breath, bought a template, and have been hacking it about for most of this week. I reckon the big relaunch could well happen over the weekend, given that there is once again no soccer game on Sunday. I realise this also means remembering how to hack the template of this blog as well, to make it all look seamless - just add that to the list; I'm not busy otherwise!

Watch this space...

What do you mean, displacement activity while I wait for my beta readers to finish reading?

Well, let's be honest, the book has a proposal for a cover. I'm actively considering starting a competition to have people choose things like the cover or the back cover blurb or a hundred other things I need to do before actually pushing the boat out on this. I do now have a selection of beta readers (thank you, beta readers), which is encouraging Thanks to a post on a messageboard I don't usually frequent, I even have a couple of beta readers who are complete strangers to me, which is at once encouraging and terrifying. Feedback form the beta readers will go into tidying up and refining the text, and then...

And then I need to let the world know that there's a book out there which they might like to read. This part is trickier than it sounds, and it sound pretty damn tricky. There are literally hundreds of ebooks published on Amazon every week; how to stand out from that sea of words? Clearly, there are no easy answers, but I do have some ideas. Twitter and Facebook obviously have a part to play, as does the website (note to sef; really must do something with that), but there must be other ways to get the word out - other avenues I'm not yet reaching.

I'm working on it. I'd rather be writing, but this is all part of the process.

This has been a weekend of discovery. Among the many things I have discovered are:

Putting your book out there, even if it's mostly to people you know, is scary. Thanks to those who have already agreed to be beta readers - I'm open to more offers...

I can quickly create an iBooks version as well as a Kindle version of the text.

I can very slowly begin to see how hard this next bit is going to be. I knocked up a quick cover last weekend so that I could get stuff out on Kindle, but doing it properly, so it looks like an actual book cover? Whole different box of frogs.

I've also rewritten the back cover blurb more times than the rest of the book put together, and I'm still nowhere near happy with it.

I've been reading and researching the pros and cons of 'traditional' vs self-publishing. I'm old enough to remember when 'self-publishing' meant 'vanity publishing'; I'm delighted that it's no longer the case, but I'm a little daunted by how much work it's likely to be. I'd still like to have, you know, an agent, an editor, a publisher; all that good stuff, but I know how hard that is from here. Let's say I'm working on all possibilities right now.

Someone who I have never met, and who has never read my book thinks it's too long. I don't doubt his expertise, and I am quite prepared to bow to his superior knowledge when it comes to this sort of thing. Agents probably don't ever look at books over a certain length, publishers even less so. But I can't help feeling there's something wrong with the way that works. When people ask me how long my book is, I tell them, and they tend to be impressed by how it's possible to produce so many words in one go. The truth is, there are that many words in the book because that's how long the story is. How do I know? Well, I cut several thousand words out of it without losing the sense of it, but if I cut more, I'll start to lose elements which have already fought their way in. If I take any more out of part 2, for example, part 3 won't make sense, and I do have a real fear that 'shorter' would mean 'simpler', and this is not a simple tale.

The story is as long as it wants to be. Just as some characters don't conform to how you think they should behave, so stories have a life of their own. Sure, I could make Going Back shorter, but then it wouldn't be the story I want to tell. More importantly, it wouldn't be the story it wants to be.

For that reason, if no other, I suspect that self-publishing is going to be the way forward. Which means I have to get my cover right, and I have to do my own market research, and I have to figure out how to market it, and how to price it, and a million other things I haven't really considered yet.

There's now a Kindle version of Parts 1 and 2. I can send this to anyone prepared to read it through and give some feedback. You do need to have a Kindle and a Kindle account, and you do need to help me understand where I need to go next, not just say 'Yeah, it was OK', or "Nah, not my kind of thing'.

If you are interested, please let me know via info@richardwatt.ca and I'll send you the details.

No new progress today (yet) - going to start on Part 3 soon, though; I'd like to have something more complete by the end of the week if I can, before coaching, school and all the other daily fun stuff starts to intrude.

Somewhat to my surprise, I've chomped through the whole of the rest of part 2 this afternoon. I am significantly happier with it than I have ever been; I need to do my timeline chart again to see how much different it looks; but it feels to me as if something significant has changed in the structure.

The next job is to fire up Smashwords and see if I can make it Kindle friendly, so I can press it on unsuspecting victims, and have them read it to tell me what I've missed out which needs to go back in; there will definitely be some of that, but I refuse to worry about it. That which I feared I would never be able to do has, in fact, been done, and in time for the new year, too.

2013 marks 10 years since I first sketched out an idea for a short story. It would be really nice if I spent the year trying to sell the thing rather than trying to endlessly rewrite it. Stay tuned; and if you have a Kindle and fancy reading two-thirds of a novel, just let me know

Oh, and Happy New Year (we're not there yet, but it's not so far away now)

However, a solid day at it, and I can see the light. The monkey on my back is showing signs of moving. It's not gone yet, but things are improving. My problem has been that I know part 2 is uneven and poorly structured, and I haven't had the willpower to do anything about it. Well, this afternoon, I sat down, put on the Last Night of the Proms from the summer, and started work on it.

It's not easy; much needs to come out, but I really think it's working. In the course of the afternoon, I have radically reshaped the first chunk of Part 2, and done the painful bit - ruthlessly editing some of my favourite parts, so that the story can flow without repeating much of what has already been said.

I've just added things up - I've taken 11% of the existing text out, which is more or less what the books say should happen when you rewrite, and much to my surprise, I really like how it feels now. I'm perhaps a third of the way through rewriting part 2, but it feels right; it has a balance and a flow which has never been there, and my fear that we don't get to know Anne well enough turns out to be baseless; in fact, by trimming some things, I think she becomes a more believable person; a little less eccentric, and more likely to do the things she does.

Many thanks to those here and elsewhere who have been supportive of the project; we're off to San Francisco this morning, but thanks to the positive feedback, one more poor sucker kind person has been sent a copy of part 1, and I feel much more enthusiastic about getting it out there, warts and all.

On an entirely unrelated point, I have been seriously impressed by Salt Publishing and their Herculean online efforts in support of their Booker nominee this year. That's the kind of publisher a budding author finds himself gravitating towards...

A quick memory, this. This was the first 'serious' album I owned, in 1974. I didn't really know much about them, except that they were de rigeur among the boys in my year, and I really ought to fit in. It wasn't quite what I expected - I didn't know about them having replaced lead singers; it would be another year or so before I was reading the weekly music press - but it made an immediate impact; loud and seemingly designed to irritate one's parents, it was also perfect for those air guitar moments (ah, the innocence of youth...). One Sunday afternoon, I put it on to accompany my homework, and my father, passing the door, commented:

"Fascinatin' Rhythm". And, do you know, he was right...

What I think now:

Well, I don’t really have anything to add to the memory – it still sounds like Gershwin, and I’m sure I read somewhere that Ritchie Blackmore had indeed based the riff on ‘Fascinatin’ Rhythm’. There was much I didn’t say about Deep Purple; how I gradually acquainted myself with their back catalogue, how I figured out who was and had been in the band; how I despaired of ever seeing them, as they disintegrated around the time I started going to gigs, and then got back together just as I had tired of the whole concert-going experience – more on this later, I’m sure.

Since then:

All you have to do is wait 38 years, apparently. Earlier this year, the boys and I trucked along to the CN Centre to watch Deep Purple in the flesh.

Of course, in keeping with Purple, there were relatively few members of the classic lineups in the band, but Gillan, Glover and Paice were all present and correct, and – much to my surprise, they still sounded like a proper rock band – it could have been cabaret, but it was way better than that. For reasons which will only be obvious if you’ve studied the history of the band, they didn’t play ‘Burn’. It didn’t matter.

I'll start at the beginning, with the Beatles - Michelle. An odd choice, you might think, but it's the first piece of popular music I'm conscious of knowing. It wasn't a new song at the time - this must have been about 1968 - but there was a girl in my infants class called Michelle, and we all sang it. It's probably also the first piece of French I ever knew, although I can't reconcile this to the holidays we had in Brittany, when I certainly picked up enough to go across the road and buy the bread every day.

It certainly predates the second Beatles song I was aware of - Yellow Submarine: we all went mad for Yellow Submarine when it came out - my friend Guy had the Dinky toy, I was green. Where are you now, Guy? Where are the rest of them - Garry and Glenn, Debra, Mrs Hutchinson - I should look on Friends Reunited, shouldn't I? Engayne Infant School, Upminster: it feels like another world now.

What I think now:

Well, I’m happy for this to stand as my first proper musical memory, and I remember it clearly, as opposed to remember remembering it (if you follow me). However, on almost all the material facts, I was either wrong, or things have changed…

I almost certainly don’t remember the Beatles version! Well, of course, what I mean is that the version we all sang back then was the one we were hearing on the radio by the Overlanders. Of course, I do know the Beatles version, but it wasn’t until I tried finding the YouTube links that it occurred to me that what I knew and what I remembered sounded different.

Yellow Submarine still stands, of course, and if I really wanted (and thought really hard about last names), I could probably find my old friends on Facebook now. Engayne School is there, of course, although there’s no separate infants part now.

And is it another world? Probably not as much now as it was then. Now, from where I sit, all of Britain feels like another world. Don’t think I saw that one coming at the time.

Since then:

I made the effort to buy Beatles music once it was easily available digitally, and as a consequence, Conor (but not so much Cameron) has become a Beatles fan, which is a Good Thing. He is, however, more of an Abbey Road boy than a Rubber Soul one. I’m sure I’ve told him how Michelle is my earliest popular music memory, but I’ve never thought to ask him what his might be…

Ten years ago, I had this idea. I wanted to mark my 40th birthday by writing something, and then – as I put it at the time – decided on 40 somethings. I compiled a list of 40 pieces of music which served as milestones in my life to that point, and wrote about them on the blog I kept at that time.

The original idea, I think, was for it to be a collection of 40 individual pieces of music, but that quickly fell by the wayside – many of the musicians or composers involved prompted more than one memory, and the whole thing got a bit free-form at times, which isn’t in itself a bad thing – it just evolved.

So, ten years on, I – of course – have the idea to do it all again. With ten more memories, naturally. This serves more than one purpose; as well as helping me take stock of half a century, and looking at how my musical landscape has (or probably hasn’t) changed in that time, it also will force me to actually do that ‘being a writer’ thing of actually, you know, writing. Every day, or as close to it as I can manage, since there will be some travel involved between now and October 19th, and I’d rather not write and coach at the same time if I can avoid it.

How is this helping with 'Going Back?' - well, I'll be writing every day, which is important. Also, some of the people I sent Part 1 to might see this and be prodded into feeding back some of that feedback (Hi, Dave!), and we're heading out of the summer, so there will be more writing time available. And I'll use it for writing - honest.

How this will work: I’ve gone back over the original 40 memories, and I’ve added ten more. A couple of them probably should have been in the first 40, the rest are prompted by things that have happened in the last ten years. I’m working on the order things appear in – ten years ago, everything was random, I might well tweak the order a little this time round. I’ll also mostly stand by what I said last time out, although I reserve the right to embellish and explain if necessary. Where relevant, I’ll update the memories with things which have happened since 2002 – in some cases, that’s quite a significant amount; in others, the memories remain in aspic. Also, there's a lot more information out there now than there was 10 years ago; research for this will throw up all sorts of interesting things, some of which I'll share with you, you lucky people.

I’ll try to make it clear what’s old and what’s new, and I’ll definitely replace almost all of the links in the original with working links, mostly from YouTube. They’ll break again, but with any luck, not as quickly as the originals broke.

Oh, and if you use Google Chrome, may I recommend the inline YouTube extension? It will enhance your reading pleasure enormously, honest.